RubyMotion for Android and Renewals Pricing

Since the introduction of the public beta of RubyMotion for Android last week there have been questions about the future pricing of RubyMotion, and rightfully so. This post will address this in as simple and open a way as possible.

RubyMotion for Android

After long deliberation, the team decided that RubyMotion should be a single product that supports iOS, OS X, and now Android as well. It is our belief that the vast majority of mobile developers have to (or would like to) target both iOS and Android. Therefore it makes more sense to us to provide support for all platforms in a single package over selling multiple separate packages.

Thus, there will be no extra charge for the Android version of RubyMotion. Yes, you read that right, 0 extra euros, dollars, or even yen!

With just a one-click purchase, one will be able to write iOS, Android and Mac apps, all using the same toolchain, language and text editor.

Updates and support renewal

In the past, RubyMotion has been a one-time purchase that came with one year of updates & support and it was possible to renew the updates & support at half the price of the full license. However, with several thousand customers, the math makes it so that this is no longer sustainable over the long term.

For one thing, we have been answering many support questions concerning more than just the RubyMotion toolchain. We take pride in being able to do this because we care about our customers, and we want everyone’s experience building RubyMotion apps to be a good one. As a nice side-effect, this has allowed us to respond to your needs by putting out regular monthly software updates that improve the total experience for all our customers. We believe it is in everyone’s best interest to keep doing this, but the fact is that we are now increasing our workload by a factor of 2 with the addition of the Android platform.

Therefore, RubyMotion license renewals will now be priced at the same price as a new licenses. This will help us better scale our organization for the development, maintenance, and our support of RubyMotion for everyone going forward into this new bright future.

To summarize, annual charges will be set at $199,-. That’s only $16.50 a month. We personally spend more than that on coffee ;)

Thank you all for your continued support! Without it we could not be a fully bootstrapped company, free of investors saying what we should do over what we think is important for you, our customers.